What Happens When We Die?

“What happens when we die?” is not a biological question. We know that our hearts and brains stop functioning. It is not an abstract academic question either. Billions of people have died, including some of our own loved ones. Each of us will die unless the Lord returns first. It is a personal, existential, and troubling question. So we anxiously want to probe beyond physical death—what happens to us?

Given only what we know from this life, the answer is a mystery. There are no decisive arguments or evidence, even from paranormal, mystical, and near-death experiences. Different religions and secular worldviews hold very different beliefs for widely divergent reasons—permanent extinction, reincarnation, union with the cosmic Life-force or Consciousness, Paradise with God, and various others. Who really knows?

Christians trust that God has revealed the answer in the Bible. We have the promise of eternal life through Jesus Christ. But not all Christians understand what Scripture teaches about eternal life and the transition to it in the same way. What follows is a summary of Christian beliefs about what happens when we die.

The Ecumenical Christian Answer

Most Christian churches—Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and historic Protestant churches—believe that Scripture teaches what theologian N. T. Wright calls a two-stage view of life after life. The first stage is between death and bodily resurrection, sometimes called the intermediate state. Our souls—egos, selves, spirits, persons—we are taken to be with Christ in heaven until his Second Coming, when our souls and bodies are reunited, all dead humans are raised, and all undergo Final Judgment. The second stage is final and unending. For God’s people, it is life and fellowship with Him, praising him as glorified bodily beings and reigning with Christ in his everlasting Kingdom—the New Heaven and Earth. For God’s enemies, it is everlasting separation and judgment. This vision is the ecumenical Christian answer.

This answer includes three dualities. The first is chronological: we exist for a period between death and resurrection and then for an everlasting future. The second is locational: we exist temporarily in heaven and then permanently in the New Heaven and Earth. The third is anthropological: we exist temporarily without our mortal bodies and then are reunited with them as they are made imperishable and glorious by God’s Spirit.

Different Christian Answers

Some doctrinal variations arise within the ecumenical understanding of Scripture. One example is the Roman Catholic doctrine of purgatory—that, between death and resurrection, some believers do penance for sins that were forgiven but not sufficiently resisted in life. Another is soul sleep, the belief of some Anabaptists that the souls of the dead with Christ between death and resurrection are not conscious.

Other differences result when Christians reject the dualities of the ecumenical consensus. Some embrace a one-stage view of the afterlife. They believe that we attain our final destiny immediately after death. Eliminating one duality affects the others as well—heaven and earth; body and soul.

Accordingly, some Christians—both fundamentalists and modernists in different ways—hold that at death our souls or spirits are immediately taken to Heaven with Christ and remain there for eternity. But then they do not affirm the resurrection of the body or the renewal of the earth. This is the position that is most like Plato’s.

Other modern Christians reject the traditional body-soul duality. They believe that it is incompatible with modern biology and it originates in Greek philosophy, not the Bible. Some who reject a body-soul duality affirm a one-stage doctrine of the afterlife: an immediate bodily resurrection. At the moment of death, God immediately resurrects us in his final Kingdom. They deny the existence of the soul without the body and heaven without earth. Other modern Christians who reject body-soul duality do continue to affirm a two-stage view. The first stage is a period between death and resurrection when souls—persons—do not exist at all, thus forming a gap in their existence. They exist again in a later second stage, when God resurrects them bodily at the return of Christ.

Conclusion

As a Christian in the Reformed tradition, I embrace the doctrine of the traditional ecumenical answer as the teaching of Scripture. I think that Christians should continue to discuss our differences in the light of Scripture and work to resolve them. Important personal and pastoral concerns are at stake, not to mention crucial issues of biblical interpretation and revelation and reason. For these reasons I greatly appreciate the work of Biola’s Center for Christian Thought this year on the topic of the Neuroscience and the Soul. But the differences among Christians ought not to undermine our common witness to the world:  That, apart from Jesus Christ, we humans have no real hope for the Life we all desire before or after we die.